Top Secret
(part 3 of 3)
by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin
(To go to the Washington Post web page with these three articles, slide shows, videos, and related articles click here or if that comes up small print go to : http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ or Google Wash Post, Top Secret America.)
In suburbs across the nation, the intelligence community goes about its anonymous business. Its work isn’t seen, but its impact is surely felt.
The brick warehouse is not just a warehouse. Drive through the gate and around back, and there, hidden away, is someone's personal security detail: a fleet of black SUVs that have been armored up to withstand explosions and gunfire.
Along the main street, the signs in the median aren't advertising homes for sale; they're inviting employees with top-secret security clearances to a job fair at Cafe Joe, which is anything but a typical lunch spot.
The new gunmetal-colored office building is really a kind of hotel where businesses can rent eavesdrop-proof rooms.
Even the manhole cover between two low-slung buildings is not just a manhole cover. Surrounded by concrete cylinders, it is an access point to a government cable. "TS/SCI," whispers an official, the abbreviations for "top secret" and "sensitive compartmented information" - and that means few people are allowed to know what information the cable transmits.
All of these places exist just outside
Other locations include Dulles-Chantilly, Denver-Aurora and
The difference, of course, is that the military is not a secret culture. In the clusters of Top Secret America, a company lanyard attached to a digital smart card is often the only clue to a job location. Work is not discussed. Neither are deployments. Debate about the role of intelligence in protecting the country occurs only when something goes wrong and the government investigates, or when an unauthorized disclosure of classified information turns into news.
The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don't
realize when they're nearing the epicenter of
Once this happens, it means that ground zero - the National Security Agency - is close by. But it's not easy to tell where. Trees, walls and a sloping landscape obscure the NSA's presence from most vantage points, and concrete barriers, fortified guard posts and warning signs stop those without authorization from entering the grounds of the largest intelligence agency in the United States.
Beyond all those obstacles loom huge buildings with row after row of opaque, blast-resistant windows, and behind those are an estimated 30,000 people, many of them reading, listening to and analyzing an endless flood of intercepted conversations 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
From the road, it's impossible to tell how large the NSA has become, even though its buildings occupy 6.3 million square feet - about the size of the Pentagon - and are surrounded by 112 acres of parking spaces. As massive as that might seem, documents indicate that the NSA is only going to get bigger: 10,000 more workers over the next 15 years; $2 billion to pay for just the first phase of expansion; an overall increase in size that will bring its building space throughout the Fort Meade cluster to nearly 14 million square feet.
The NSA headquarters sits on the Fort Meade Army base, which hosts 80 government tenants in all, including several large intelligence organizations.
Together, they inject $10 billion from paychecks and contracts into the
region's economy every year - a figure that helps explain the rest of the
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Just beyond the NSA perimeter, the companies that thrive off the agency and other nearby intelligence organizations begin. In some parts of the cluster, they occupy entire neighborhoods. In others, they make up mile-long business parks connected to the NSA campus by a private roadway guarded by forbidding yellow "Warning" signs.
The largest of these is the
More than 250 companies - 13 percent of all the firms in Top Secret America -
have a presence in the
Inside the locations are employees who must submit to strict, intrusive rules. They take lie-detector tests routinely, sign nondisclosure forms and file lengthy reports whenever they travel overseas. They are coached on how to deal with nosy neighbors and curious friends. Some are trained to assume false identities.
If they drink too much, borrow too much money or socialize with citizens from certain countries, they can lose their security clearances, and a clearance is the passport to a job for life at the NSA and its sister intelligence organizations.
Chances are they excel at math: To do what it does, the NSA relies on the
largest number of mathematicians in the world. It needs linguists and technology
experts, as well as cryptologists, known as "crippies." Many know themselves as
ISTJ, which stands for "Introverted with Sensing, Thinking and Judging," a
basket of personality traits identified on the Myers-Briggs personality test and
prevalent in the
The old joke: "How can you tell the extrovert at NSA? He's the one looking at someone else's shoes."
"These are some of the most brilliant people in the world," said Ken Ulman,
executive of
The schools, indeed, are among the best, and some are adopting a curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior would disqualify them.
Outside one school is the jarring sight of yellow school buses lined up across from a building where personnel from the "Five Eye" allies - the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - share top-secret information about the entire world.
The buses deliver children to neighborhoods that are among the wealthiest in
the country; affluence is another attribute of Top Secret America. Six of the 10
richest counties in the
"If this were a Chrysler plant, we'd be talking Chrysler in the bowling
alley, Chrysler in the council meetings, Chrysler, Chrysler, Chrysler," said
Kent Menser, a Defense Department employee helping
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The impact of the NSA and other secretive organizations in this cluster is
not just monetary. It shades even the flow of traffic one particular day as a
white van pulls out of a parking lot and into
That white van is followed by five others just like it.
Inside each one, two government agents in training at the secretive
But on this day, they are trainees connected to one another by radios and
specially labeled street maps. Some 4,000 federal and military agents attend
counterintelligence classes in the
The agent riding shotgun in one white van holds the maps on her lap as she frantically moves yellow stickies around, trying to keep tabs on the other vans and the suspect, or "rabbit," as he is called.
Other agents gun their engines and race 60 mph, trying to keep up with the rabbit while alerting one another to the presence of local police, who don't know that the vans weaving in and out of traffic are driven by federal agents.
Suddenly, the rabbit moves a full block ahead of the closest van, passes through a yellow light, then drives out of sight as the agents get stuck at a red light.
Green light.
"Go!" an agent yells in vain through the windshield as the light changes and the car in front of her pokes along. "Move! Move! Move!"
"We lost him," her partner groans as they do their best to catch up.
Finally, the agents end their surveillance on foot at a Borders bookstore in
Their instructor cringes. "The hardest part is the demeanor," he confides, watching as the agents follow the rabbit in the store, filled with women in shifts and children in flip-flops. "Some of them just can't relax enough to get the demeanor right. . . . They should be acting like they're browsing, but they are looking over the top of a book and never move."
Throughout the cluster are examples of how the hidden world and the public
one intersect. A Quiznos sandwich shop in the cluster has the familiarity of any
other restaurant in the national chain, except for the line that begins forming
at
Bill Brown, left, and Jerome James tend to James's property
in suburban
In another part of the cluster, Jerome Jones, one of its residents, is talking about the building that has sprung up just beyond his back yard. "It used to be all farmland, then they just started digging one day," he says. "I don't know what they do up there, but it doesn't bother me. I don't worry about it."
The building, sealed off behind fencing and
Just 6700.
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Inside such a building might be Justin Walsh, who spends hours each day on a
ladder, peering into the false ceilings of the largest companies in Top Secret
America. Walsh is a Defense Department industrial security specialist, and every
cluster has a version of him, whether it's
When he's not on his ladder, Walsh is tinkering with a copy machine to make sure it cannot reproduce the secrets stored in its memory. He's testing the degausser, a giant magnet that erases data from classified hard drives. He's dissecting the alarm system, its fiber-optic cable and the encryption it uses to send signals to the control room.
The government regulates everything in Top Secret America: the gauge of steel in a fence, the grade of paper bag to haul away classified documents, the thickness of walls and the height of raised soundproof floors.
In the
Soon, there will be one more in the
Lane, senior vice president of Ryan Commercial real estate, has become something of a snoop himself when it comes to the NSA. At 55, he has lived and worked in its shadow all his life and has schooled himself on its growing presence in his community. He collects business intelligence using his own network of informants, executives like himself hoping to making a killing off an organization many of his neighbors don't know a thing about.
He notices when the NSA or a different secretive government organization
leases another building, hires more contractors and expands its outreach to the
local business community. He's been following construction projects, job
migrations, corporate moves. He knows that local planners are estimating that
10,000 more jobs will come with an expanded NSA and an additional 52,000 from
other intelligence units moving to the
Lane was up on all the gossip months before it was announced that the next giant military command, U.S. Cyber Command, would be run by the same four-star general who heads the NSA. "This whole cyber thing is going to be big," he says. "A cyber command could eat up all the building inventory out there."
Lane knows this because he has witnessed the post-9/11 growth of the NSA, which now ingests 1.7 billion pieces of intercepted communications every 24 hours: e-mails, bulletin board postings, instant messages, IP addresses, phone numbers, telephone calls and cellphone conversations.
In her own way, Jeani Burns has witnessed this, too.
Burns, a businesswoman in the
"I can spot them," she says. The suit. The haircut. The demeanor. "They have a haunted look, like they're afraid someone is going to ask them something about themselves."
Since
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Undercover agents come in here, too, she whispers, to watch the same people, "to make sure no one is saying too much."
Burns would know - she's been living with one of those secretive men for 20 years. He used to work at the NSA. Now he's one of its contractors. He's been to war. She doesn't know where. He does something important. She doesn't know what.
She says she fell for him two decades ago and has had a life of adjustments ever since. When they go out with other people, she says, she calls ahead with cautions: "Don't ask him stuff." Sometimes people get it, but when they don't, "it's a pain. We just didn't go out with them again."
She describes him as "an observer. I'm the interloper," she says. "It bothers me he never takes me traveling, never thinks of anything exciting to do. . . . I feel cheated."
But she also says: "I really respect him for what's he's done. He's spent his whole life so we can keep our way of living, and he doesn't get any public recognition."
Outside the bar, meanwhile, the cluster hums along. At night, in the confines
of the
And inside the NSA, the mathematicians, the linguists, the techies and the crippies are flowing in and out. The ones leaving descend in elevators to the first floor. Each is carrying a plastic bar-coded box. Inside is a door key that rattles as they walk. To those who work here, it's the sound of a shift change.
As employees just starting their shifts push the turnstiles forward, those
who are leaving push their identity badges into the mouth of the key machine. A
door opens. They drop their key box in, then go out through the turnstiles. They
drive out slowly through the barriers and gates protecting the NSA, passing a
steady stream of cars headed in. It's almost
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this story.